In the wake of news that Apple Inc. is intentionally slowing the processing speeds of some older iPhones, the company has been hit with at least three class action lawsuits filed across the country.

Separate groups of plaintiffs lawyers sued Apple on Thursday in federal courts in California's Northern and Central districts and the Northern District of Illinois.

“Apple's decision to purposefully slowdown or throttle down these devices was undertaken to fraudulently induce consumers to purchase the latest iPhone versions of the iPhone 7, as well as new phones such as the iPhone 8 and iPhone X,” wrote the lawyers in the Illinois complaint.

Apple representatives didn't respond to a request for comment on the lawsuits.

The suits came shortly after Apple officials told tech website TechCrunch on Wednesday that the company installed “a feature” on some older iPhone models that have batteries that can't meet the peak current demands required to operate in cold conditions or when phone batteries have a low charge. The company said its aim was to “smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed” in order to avoid unexpected shutdowns of the older phones.

The statement from Apple came after chatter about the older phones' performance on Reddit sparked a Dec. 18 post from the founder of the company behind Geekbench processor testing software. Primate Labs founder John Poole said that iPhones with older batteries exhibited “lower-than-expected” performance in recent tests. Poole concluded that Apple's fix to the sudden shutdown problem in older phones would “cause users to think, 'My phone is slow so I should replace it,' not, 'My phone is slow so I should replace its battery.'”

The three lawsuits bring a variety of claims, including that Apple fraudulently concealed problems with batteries in the older phones, that its moves violated state consumer protection laws, and, in the Central District of California case, that the company trespassed onto consumers phones by interfering with the speed of their devices.

“Apple had the choice to inform consumers and failed to do so,” said James Vlahakis of Sulaiman Law Group, lead counsel in the Illinois case. “Here clearly Apple knew what they were doing and didn't tell anybody. It's that simple.”